As of this writing I've taken thousands of photos, over 20,000 at my current job as a product photographer and more than forty thousand since 2012. I have been using a Nikon D3400 for several years and recently rented a Sigma fp cinema camera. great camera especially in low light condistions.

My Canon Powershot SX530 HS

I have been taking many pictures with my new Canon Powershot Camera.

Earlier this year I became concerned on what can be done if you have a grey day. What can you do to help colors?

The Powershot has a feature I have decided helps this issue. On grey days I use the Vivid color feature to brighten colors. I think this feature works too well, so I end up bringing the photo into Photoshop and de-saturating the image just ever so slightly to make it look better than it did on the auto setting but not so much color as to make it look fake.

The problem with is the colors are not natural, but they are colorful compared to the grey tones.

White balance for different color.

Today I went out to take pictures. It is a very good day for taking pictures. I prefer, presently, days with very low humidity. Humidity in the atmosphere tends to light up a little bit and it ends up in your photograph as a kind over lightening of your image. Your eye sees this and your mind accommodates it. Your camera though takes it all in.

My Canon Powershot flashed a little thumbnail sign at me today. It suggested I change my white balance settings. I had set my white balance about 2 weeks ago on a very bright sunny day. The manual setting on the Powershot uses that white balance.

It is important to update your manual white balance at each new location you use. I hadn't done that so I took out a white piece of paper and re-calibrated the white balance. I used the back of a receipt at first, and it turned the color tones in the view finder green.

I tried again, same results.

Then I went back to the mini-van and puled out a sheet of typewriter paper and stuck it on the back windshield under the rear windshield wiper which had the direct sun beaming down on it. I got a great white balance then, the colors looked great in the view finder afterwards. Or so I thought.

I took some more pictures. The Autumn colors are really on right now. But I wasn't seeing the same bright colors in the view finder. I went back to the white balance settings and changed the setting to fluorescent.

Big difference. But I am not sure the colors are any better. I think I prefer using the white balance I calibrated better than changing to the fluorescent mode for outdoors under sunshine.

The difference I am seeing is a kind of slight reddening and maybe a little bit of browning to the captured image.

The Autumn Colors

Over the next 2 weeks the Autumn Colors are going to become brilliant. A friend of mine told me today that the trip out to his farm, about an hour away, was particularly spectacular.

I will post some links to my photo blog at 500px.com for you to take a look at the nice colors the trees are showing us this year.

500px.com

I have been posting my photographs to 500px.com.

I found this site about 2 years ago and enjoy the features it has. I started with it because I rented a camera to shoot video of a concert in 2013 and as part of the rental I got a discount card to 500px.com.

So I opened an account.

500px.com keeps adding features that I enjoy, and I keep discovering more features as I look through the dashboard and other available links.

A couple weeks ago I created a 500px portfolio of my photos. I used the statistics feature to help decide which photographs would become a part of my current portfolio. And I have already taken the first photos down and placed new pictures in my portfolio.

500px.com has an algorithm called Pulse. I have no idea what the parameters are to generate the Pulse figure for one of my photos is but with it and the number of views my photos receive I make decisions on which photos seem to be right for my portfolio.

Here is a link to my current portfolio:  http://photoplane.500px.com/

I have noticed the portfolio seems to soften the focus of my pictures. That bothers me a little because sharp looking photos are important, especially for my landscape images and I hope to sell photographs from this site. I suspect the photos get processed through a Flash system. Flash is falling out of favor as a web display system because of security issues.

The portfolio presentation is extremely good except for that issue.

I would rather you look at my photos right off the photo tiles though, located here:

https://500px.com/photoplane

When you click on any of those tiles you get to see the pictures as clearly as I see them through the camera. Now it is several years later and I stopped using 500px because they really don't pay enough for my pictures given the tiome and effort that went into them, and now we are iin the Ai world and images can be generated by artificial intelligences, with very good composition capabilities.

a cloned account

I had a strange thing happen the other day.

I re-named an online account of mine and a cloned account was created at the same time.

So my old account got a new name, and the clone took the old name and added a numeric 1 to the end of it.


I sit here and ponder this.


My immediate reaction was to email tech support because I thought something malicious happened. I thought perhaps a hacker had somehow managed to be waiting at the right moment and then when I re-named the account, because there was a credit card attached to the old account, and money applied to the old account (which meant the account fell into a higher category of user type, it became more significant in a number of ways (better dashboard controls, statistics and so on)), and this is reaching a bit admittedly, but that extra gave it a little more life, so to speak.

Which made me wonder.

I informed tech support and they deleted the new clone account.

It begs the question... did the data that made up that old account want to come to life and because it was threatened by my wanting to give my account a new name it decided to give birth to itself as a clone?


Think about this. The implications are quite significant. What if this Universe was created in much the same way?

What if, as the Gnostics believe, there was only a single all one-ness and some part of that one-ness wanted its freedom, and the other part decided the new part needed a new name and in so naming the new, a clone of the old was created?

For those of you that know the Gnostic storyline this makes sense. I'll leave this discussion there for now.

It begs another question... Did I inadvertently kill off a new form of life?

What would the clone have done had it continued? Would I have had to keep "feeding it" new content? Would it have eventually expired itself on its own?


The online service this happened with is a photography site. There are literally millions of photographs on this site.

Is it possible by so much human input, so much intense interest in the photos uploaded that those collective thoughts, at the right moment, given the right conditions, when I decided to re-name my account, gave birth to the clone?

Using the Macro ability of your digital camera.

My digital camera, the Canon SX530 Powershot has been very nice to me. One of the things I noticed that was not so nice are the measurements scale for the macro zoom functions. Macro zoom, for those of you who don't know, is for shooting extremely close to a subject. 1 to 6 inches is close. Some people like to take a picture that is even closer.

My camera was set to metric measurements and while I understand the accuracy of the metric system, I switched mine to inches so I could better use the macro ability. I know what 1 and 2 inches looks like, whereas I don't know what 50cm looks like.

'Having written that though, I set the macro focus to 1 inch and then put the camera about 1 inch away from this keyboard I am using. The letter G was still a little out of focus.

My point is trust what your eyes see as focused, and then take the picture.

The Powershot has an interesting feature that I can't presently take advantage of. I can connect an HDMI device.

I mentioned this a few posts ago. If I could carry around a tablet or some other large self powered screen device, a Macbook Pro, or an iPad with a Lightroom type of application I could use that large screen to really see how well my subject is focused.

And of course, some subjects, like a moving hummingbird, don't allow you the time, so you have to trust the camera to capture as best as it can for you.

Here is...

Here is a gallery of my vertically oriented (vertoramas) and large photographs (click the link below the photo to go see the gallery please):

Vertorama Gallery

Interesting feature of the Canon Powershot camera.

This observation probably applies to most cameras that are newer DSLR and HiDEF digital video cameras.

I have started to get used to my new Canon Powershot SX530 and found that it has two ports built into it. I was a little surprised that neither was a USB computer connection. Both ports are A/V outputs.

One is HDMI, the other connection I am not presently familiar with.

What this allows for is to connect an external screen to the camera. Like an Apple iPhone or better yet the large iPad because now you can use the iPad in place of the camera LCD screen to compose and manage the scene you are going to shoot still pictures or video with. A larger screen means you will be able to adjust focus and lighting before shooting and get the best image acquisition possible.

If you have an iPad, make the connection and use the pad as your viewscreen.

Additionally, you can load a Lightroom application into the pad, and use the camera, the iPad, and Lightroom in live, real-time situations at the same time to compose, color adjust, and get incredibly sharp focus as well as manipulate the scene all before shooting it.

This will raise the quality of your photos.

Back to cameras...

I now have 4 cameras. I recently added a Canon Powershot SX530 HS.

This is a nice little camera.

The first aspect I enjoyed learning was the 200 power zoom. It is 160 power optical with digital zoom that really extends the reach, and with a tripod you can get a good picture with the 160 power zoom. The digital zoom, while impressive to be able to zoom in on something so far away, the quality of the image drops off and begins to pixel-ize.

This pixelization can be both good and bad. A degraded image can add to how the image plays to the story being told.

If for example the 200 power zoomed picture were to be examined in some kind of procedural way, for example if the story is using the image to explain how something happened for forensic or other reasons and is viewed as an element inside the main frame of the picture then it adds to the way the story plays. This can also go the other way, by using the camera in its movie mode and being zoomed all the way at 200x, the story might be enhanced in a negative space kind of way, depicting amateur imaging to unfold the story from an unscholarly point of view, or the vision of an alien presence or a collection of evidence, or proof that something is out there, but mystery remains as part of the zoomed imagery might not be completely discernible, making it necessary for the characters in the story to go view or investigate further, thus moving the story further along, and not reducing the viewer's involvement with the story. In other words, it helps to convince the story line and does not detract from the story line, depending on how it is used.

I am still learning the camera and am loving it.  It has a hybrid feature of taking a few seconds of video and then tacks a still image image at the end of that movie clip, so you could shoot 20 or 30 minutes and have a kind of digest of hybridized video and still shots that tell a short story.

For example a journalist might be on the scene of a story and be shooting like this as a set of visual notes for memory refreshment at a later time. This then could be incorporated into a much larger story in a feature length movie. And since it is a new technique I will be working in a new field of still and video hybridization. New is not always better, I like this though.

The camera also allows you to learn the inverse qualities of aperture and shutter and how they affect each other. There is a fixed shutter setting where the camera will automatically set the aperture and a setting that goes the other way fixing aperture and automatically adjusting shutter speed. After enough use your mind will start to understand how these two aspects of photographing and acquiring moving image play together to give you good and great imagery.

The camera also has an excellent high speed feature, it can take burst mode shots. Each image is 4 megapixels, which isn't great quality, but still pretty good, and this setting allows you to acquire 20 or 30 photos of high speed action.

It is a 16 megapixel camera with a nice mix of automatic and manual features, from white balance to a nice fish-eye lensing effect I can easily recommend this for the beginning photographer and you'll get great photographs by just using the automatic features, and you'll get to learn professional photography concepts as this scales up in difficulty of use by adding in manual settings a little at a time.

And since I want to make a feature movie I really like its sound recording ability. It captures stereo sound, and so far (I haven't really put the audio recording to the test yet by going into a live concert for example) it is a pretty good audio recorder.

Interesting aspects of my science fiction story keep showing up in the news.

My science fiction story series, The Diegisis Series, keeps getting more interesting to me and to my online readers.

You can find copies of the stories here:

Spark Gap and Seeds of the Three Suns

As I was writing the story and eventually got to the part about Larry DeVaryo building his electron lab, and the ensuing electrical firestorm that came out of that, and Larry's adventure dealing with hundreds of balls of ball lightning that Larry accidentally created, I came across this story out of China about Ball Lightning being observed in nature for the first time:

Ball lightning recorded and seen for the first time in China.

The second item that made it into the news recently was this discovery of mysterious solid spheres and reported here:

Youtube number 9 and number 2

And here in the UK Telegraph:

UK Telegraph article.

While these items probably aren't related in anyway, and probably don't prove any kind of other earthly or alien presence, they do make the Diegisis stories a little more realistic and fun to read.

Realistically, I expect that the mysterious spheres, much like the ice age created natural rectangular rock formations, will prove to be just that -natural formations. BUT, in the Diegisis Series Sieffas is a small dragon and those mysterious spheres might be some of the moons of Voryon.

Now what do you suppose they could be doing here?

Where do you get your music?

A while back I started to research music and how you can put it in your movie.

I have come up with a couple answers to this.

One. You can go the hard route, which is probably worth it if you can get a decent song and marry it to your movie appropriately.

The hard route is via the Harry Fox agency and or any other licensing mechanical fee (needle drop fee) enterprise that has the ability to provide you permission, for pay, to use a song by an artist in your movie.

Be prepared to go through a lot of steps to get to where you want to be with this route. Big name bands can be pretty sensitive about giving clearance to their music.

And it'll cost you a lot of money, either up front for usage rights or on the back end as a part of the film profits.

Two. You can also find production music in various places. Do a Google for it and you will find some good leads on production music. You have to be careful with production music though. A couple of the sites I found have little stipulations on how you can use the music they offer. For example, in one case, after reading the licensing and use material I discovered I could buy the music but I wasn't allowed to alter it in anyway.

What good is that in today's mixology world?

Radio stations have production music libraries. I can't recommend these production libraries as you can tell the energy that makes a great piece of music simply isn't there.

Having said that, keep looking and searching, you can find production music that kicks ass and isn't by a name band. Be prepared to spend a few hundred dollars to be allowed to license it for your work.

Here is the problem with route number two: other productions can also find the same music and purchase it and put it in their movie as well.

I had it happen where I bought a piece of artwork only to have someone later tell me they saw the same piece of artwork elsewhere. That kind of news kind of sucks.

But...  There is some great production music out there that is reasonably priced.

Three. Make your own music. There are places on the web where you can find online music machines. I found a lot of them going through Stumble Upon. These machines can be a little bit of a challenge to master, but you are nearly guaranteed to have a unique piece of music, even if someone else comes along and uses the same machine to put music in their movie. The chances both of you will compose the exact same piece of music is slim to none, but you could find yourself watching someone else's movie and listening to what sounds like your song, when it isn't. That would be a kind of a surprise. I think the best use of these machines is for short movie stings, like if someone turns a corner and discovers something surprising like a meteor tearing through a hallway wall.

Four. Find a local band that wants their music out there. I have found a few of these here locally. One gentleman is an incredible free form gospel player. He can't read music and simply plays by ear.

In this case I am a little hesitant because he may be playing someone else's music and simply not know it.

In another case I found a local group of young musicians and these guys are amazing to listen to. BUT, I am not sure their music is what I would call suitable for a movie. Its kind of like saying Frank Zappa or Iggy Pop might not be right for the Sound of Music, or the John Phillip Souza doumanetary film, it might be as a contrast, but probably not good to demonstrate marching music.

Having said that, I haven't listened to this local band's entire repertoire. They have hours and hours of music, and what is particularly interesting is they apply a kind of free form playback of the songs, so each time they play it is a little bit different.

I like that. The trouble becomes getting a decent studio recording of them. That can be a challenge as they almost always have their own lives to make and their schedules don't always mesh easily with yours.

-C